Can the Environment be Racist?
Thursday, February 17, 2022
From Michael Anthony Howard, Minister of Faith in Action,
Living Water Association, Ohio North East, UCC
Tags: Streams of Connection | From Our Association Ministers | Faith in Action
How can the environment be racist? Concern for the environment is multidimensional. Though the environmental justice movement dates back to the 1970s, too many people still think caring for the environment and working for social justice are two distinct areas of engagement. We think of the air, the water, the rainforest, our lightbulbs, our cars, our food, our trash—the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Not enough of us think of our neighborhoods.
This conceptual bifurcation is especially troubling when we find it within the faith tradition where the unmasking of environmental racism first took off—the United Church of Christ. More than 35 years ago, Rev. Dr. Benjamin Chavis formally merged the civil rights movement and the environmental movement by coining the term “environmental racism.” In the company of leaders like Vicki and Robert Bullard, Chavis played a significant part in the turning point of the environmental justice movement. Moving beyond the neutral language of equity to the more volatile claim of racism, the naming of environmental racism propelled the environmental justice movement forward, leading to “a significant renegotiation of the terms of environmental law.” [1]
Rev. Ben Chavis was the Executive Director for the UCC’s Commission for Racial Justice (CRJ) when he co-authored with Charles Lee the report that put environmental racism on the map: “Toxic Waste and Race in the United States.” In that report, Chavis and Lee showed how communities of color had been intentionally chosen as sites for toxic waste disposal and high-polluting industries. The definition of racism is racial prejudice plus power, and Chavis’s CRJ report showed the world clearly what that looks like: human beings condemned to contamination because of the color of their skin. [2]
The choice of where to dispose of toxic waste is not the only form of environmental racism. Racism is insidious, present like a parasite in our social imaginations, shaping the cities we live in and the streets we use to drive through them. We have yet to reckon with our demonic histories of displacement and disinvestment. The trailer for the new film Descended from the Promised Land: The Legacy of Black Wall Street begins with a quote from John Hope Franklin: “There are two ways which whites destroy a black community. One is by building a freeway through it, the other is by changing its zoning laws.” [3]
The history of my neighborhood in Akron is a great example. In the 1930s, North Howard Street became a national destination for jazz lovers. Situated midway on the train ride from Chicago to New York, it hosted jazz giants like Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, and Louis Armstrong. In the 1970s, city planners conceived of the Innerbelt, a freeway connecting suburbanites to downtown, wiping out hundreds of black-owned businesses and displacing 737 households. Like the scars of a wound that never healed, all that remains of the jazz district and the Innerbelt is an empty stretch of steel and concrete. [4]
Our environment has been shaped by powers and principalities—modern day demons. It is time we name them.
_____
Join us on February 26 at 2 PM for the first of the four-part series Our Nature. In this first session we will discuss Environmental Racism, Urban Ecology, and Building Resilient Communities. See the flyer in this week’s Streams of Connection for more details.
[1] Richard J. Lazarus, “Environmental Racism! That’s What It Is.” in Georgetown Law Faculty Publications (January 10, 2010): 258. https:// 1 scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/160/
[2] Benjamin Chavis and Charles Lee, “Toxic Wastes and Race 2 Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites,” Commission for Racial Justice, The United Church of Christ (New York, NY: United Church of Christ, 1987).
[3] “DFTPL 2m Trailer NDL,” Transform Films, Inc., Descended From the Promised Land. 2020.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0MEGSvbx1k
[4] Semaya Bayram, “‘It was … devastating”: The Akron Innerbelt destroyed Black-owned businesses in its path,” The Akron Beacon Journal, 4 February 3, 2022.